I feel very connected to the area, very much a part of it,” he muses. “I have a strange sense of belonging which I’ve never really felt since I left Australia – in fact, I never really felt it in Australia. Walking along I have found that I have these weird feelings, feelings I’ve never really had before, of a real love towards the place. I’m here for the duration. The duration of my life.

Nick Cave talking about Brighton, from an exclusive interview by Bella Todd, in Brighton and Hove’s The Argus newspaper.

A few “infrastructure” problems showed up starting last night. Seems like there was a bit of a water shortage and a bunch of toilets were closed at bedtime, making for that uneasy feeling that it might all go terribly wrong. But this morning seems like it is all pretty much up and running again, though I still haven’t mamanged to find a working shower. (Yesterday’s ‘shower’ was more like a cold, dripping tap).

Yesterday afternoon – - spent most of it hanging around the Puppets a go Go tend with the friends and caught a little bit of music at the Folkey Dokey stage inside the Baskerville Hall. The best there was Andrew Hockey. He was kindof shy and self effacing like Ed Kuepper, but when he was singing and playing guitar it was deep and heartful.

Really missed seeing anything on the main stage last night. We were having a quite a party at Adam and Rachael’s campsite, then I took Bea back to the tent and ended up staying there myself. I better go and see some of the good stuff today.

It has just gone eleven and the music has started up. I’m off to have a look.

The festival started proper last night (Friday) and after spending a long dat helping our mates get their marquee up, we got to see some of the opening folk acts on the main stage. Early on, I really loved Brigyn who suffered through some sound problems to deliver some beautiful melodic music. Welsh sounds really good sung. I guess that is no surprise really.

Now it is about noon: the puppet tent is opening and the main stage has cranked up. Time to get out into it and see and hear some things.

There are a couple of darkish clouds hanging around but no rain yet. There was a quick shower last night that sent us scurrying back to the tent for wellies and raincoats. By the time we got the gear on, though, the rain was gone.

The countryside around here is beautiful. Staring off into the distance is a delight. The far side of the valley bathed in shafts of sunlight is just stunning.

But first, a festival and a few more days messing around in the UK and a buddhist family retreat.

Tomorrow we depart for the grounds of Baskerville Hall for the Green Man Festival. Looking interesting. See the dude with the horns above? He is some kind of logo. It is a new folk festival, small, about 1000 people only. The weather is looking ok, and we do have wellington boots.

We’ve got two iPods: Lib has a 3rd generation ‘big’ iPod and I have an iPod shuffle.

I find the 3rd generation iPod a bit hard to navigate, and not very responsive to key presses. It is slow enough to be annoying and I find it too heavy to take a lot of places. That’s why I bought myself a 512M Shuffle.

The shuffle is great. It works pretty much perfectly for my walk to and from work.

But more and more it is full of fairy stories and Tigger songs, as my daughter Bea really likes to be able to listen to her stuff, and I’m really happy to give her the shuffle because it is simple to work, she loves it, it is light and hard to break. By now, the neck cord on the shuffle is looking pretty dirty and the whol package is a bit less apple-worship pristine, if you know what I mean.

I’d love to fall in love with 3G iPod, but that isn’t going to happen. Too big, too heavy, too fragile.

I want my own iPod Mini. Oh bugger, Apple have got me again.

Now, the shipping date is listed as 27 January, a couple of weeks away still. And I’m curious: what does 512MB randomly shuffled feel like?

To try it out I made a smart playlist in iTunes limited to 512MB selected randomly from all the songs in iTunes with a rating of more than 1 star. This means it picks up everything that I’v bothered to rate as 2 stars or greater in iTunes. I went through my library and rated a whole lot more songs till I’d found 512MB worth.

And then turn on shuffle and set it to play. About one in five songs I intervene and go forward a track because I’m not in the mood. Apart from that, I leave it alone.

The result is rather good. There’s enough randomness to make it interesting, but not too much. I think 512MB is going to be good.

It seems like I have some sort of back-of-brain familiarity with all 91 songs in the playlist. I don’t know much about how our brains deal with groups of 90 or 100 things but not 2,500 (my full iTunes Library). I’ll have a look in the Mind Hacks book (thanks Phil, great present) and see if they have anything to say about this.

They’ve just announced some of the lineup for next years show, still on at the Botanic Park in Adelaide, from March 4th to 6th 2005.

We’ll be there. Who’s coming?

Update: Here are my posts from Womadelaide last year.

Here’s what she says about the gig:

Come and celebrate the spring vibe…

I’m going to be a DJ for goodness sake, at the luscious Luxe bar, 446 Beaufort Street, Mount Lawley this Wednesday [29th Sept] (tomorrow eve) at 8pm.

Here’s a taste of some of the loving, grooving tunefuls and daggy hits that will be played for your wiggling pleasure.

Unashamedly fun and eclectic…

Crazy Penis
Michael Franti & Spearhead
The Cat Empire
Queen
Blur
Rolling Stones
Missy Elliott
Adam Ant
Basement Jaxx
Abba
ZZ Top
Faithless
Deeelite
Kruder & Dorfneister
Adbulah Ibrahim
Jimmy Little
Sweet Honey On The Rock
Iggy Pop
Velvet Underground
Edwin Collins
Backyard Dog
Grace Jones
KC & Sunshine
Salt n Peppa
OutKast
Tone Loc
The Strokes
Air
Bea Bea Primrose
Bjork
The Soggy Bottom Boys
The Police
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
The Strokes

Special prizes for:

the best air guitar or lip-synching/hairbrush wielding rendition of your favourite song

Plus a chance to (re)learn how to wiggle with a hula hoop to one of the classic hula hooping songs of this century (alright alright alright alright)

Yes it’s a mid-week thing and very late notice but really, don’t we always need more music and fun in our lives? Especially the parental units out there. Go on… Call up a dancing buddy and get on up – or just meet Gra and I (and maybe even Miss Bea) and a few others for a cocktail (or milkeshake in her case). Lifts home available for some of the Southern folk at various points during the evening.

Requests in advance welcome, or bring it along on CD or vinyl

With love and wiggles

Libby

So come along!!!! Hope to see you there.

Peter Knapp (Bass baritone/ Presenter)
Sarah Sweeting (Mezzo soprano),
Tomasso Pollio (piano) and special guest
Penny Shaw (soprano).
 
“An evening of sheer delight!” The Evening Standard, London
 
Peter Knapp, opera singer, director and raconteur, invites you into his wonderful world of opera. Laugh at how it really is: the divas, the dramas and the unforeseen disasters. Listen to the loveliest singing as he joins with Prima Donna and pianist to bring you a sumptuous selection of operatic tunes. Look out as Carmen herself mingles amongst you and you find yourself being trained to join in an operatic chorus!
 
Peter Knapp trained in Italy and has sung all over the world. He bases the Revue on his many hilarious operatic experiences and in fact the idea for such a show first came to him whilst swinging from a chandelier as Don Giovanni.
 
“Peter Knapp is not only a fabulous singer, he is also a very funny man.” The Times, London
 
Dress Circle Bar, His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth
 
Friday 15th October, 7.30pm
 
Tickets $30 from BOCS ticketing 9484 1133

Cat Empire played again on Sunday, this time on the main stage. We got ourselves a couple of rows back from the front and enjoyed the experience from there. Such good musicians and so humbly competent as well. Abdullah Ibrahim then played another beautiful set and after that we just wandered through the rest of the day until it was time to find a taxi and head for the airport.

All in all, it was an amazing weekend and I’m planning on getting to the next one or maybe one of the other Womad festivals worldwide.

(You can click on the images to get a closer look).

Xeni at Boing Boing noticed LynnFox’s video for FC/Kahuna’s song Hayling. Now, Hayling is a hauntingly beautiful track, and LynnFox’s ethereal underwater digital animated sea creatures are spellbinding. But the streaming music quality just wasn’t there, so popped down to the local record shop: Mills Records.

There I found the FC/Kahuna album Machine Says Yes. I like. I like a lot.

And best of all, chatting to Tim down there at Mills, I rediscovered old favourites Lake Of Bass (which he is a part of), and their recent album Wildlife Researcher. I love their earlier EP Deep Dark Jazz, and this new one is deeper, darker, smoother and lovelier all around. Go buy this one, ok.

Discovered via Xeni & Frank

He’s got it so right.

He supports Democratic Socialism, he says, because you can’t talk about Socialism any more without spending a whole lots of words saying that it doesn’t have to be totalitarian or Stalin. And, we need a society with Compassion as a core value. Things like that.

And he gave us a lot, a long set, a lot of good song and humour. Nice to come away uplifted.